Transforming frontiers into heartlands: The immediate and long-term environmental impact of the crusades in NE Europe
Author(s): Aleksander Pluskowski; Rowena Banerjea; Alexander Brown; Daniel Makowiecki; Krish Seetah
Year: 2015
Summary
In the 13th century, crusading armies unleashed a relentless holy war against indigenous non-Christian societies in the eastern Baltic region. Tribal territories were replaced with new Christian states run by the Teutonic Order and individual bishops, who constructed castles, encouraged colonists, developed towns and introduced Christianity. At a time of deteriorating climate, their impact on the local environment, especially plants and animals, would have been profound. Furthermore, since many aspects of the natural world were sacred to the Baltic tribes, this impact would be synonymous with the cultural changes that created a new world - a European world - at this frontier of Christendom. The Ecology of Crusading project has been investigating this impact from diverse perspectives with interdisciplinary objectives. Focusing on a suite of environmental data associated with castles built by the conquering theocratic elite in Prussia and Livonia - the centres of landscape re-organisation following the crusades – the project has contextualised the role of the crusades within the ecological history of NE Europe. It has been possible to trace intensities in environmental exploitation associated with multiple waves of colonisation, as well as uses of the landscape tailored to the practical and ideological requirements of the conquerors.
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Cite this Record
Transforming frontiers into heartlands: The immediate and long-term environmental impact of the crusades in NE Europe. Aleksander Pluskowski, Alexander Brown, Rowena Banerjea, Krish Seetah, Daniel Makowiecki. Presented at The 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, San Francisco, California. 2015 ( tDAR id: 397171)
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Keywords
General
Crusades
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Environmental Archaeology
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medieval archaeology
Geographic Keywords
Europe
Spatial Coverage
min long: -11.074; min lat: 37.44 ; max long: 50.098; max lat: 70.845 ;